I had a nice opportunity to start out this year with a visit to the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in Southern California’s beautiful Marina del Rey . I did my postdoc with Yolanda Gil at ISI and we have continued to have an active collaboration, recently, doing work on using workflows for exposing networks from linked data.
I always get a jolt of information visiting ISI. Here are five pointers to things I learned this time:
1. The Karma system [github] is really leading the way on bringing data integration techniques to linked data. I’ll definitely be looking at Karma with respect to our development of the Open PHACTS platform.
2. I’m excited about change detection algorithms in particular edit distance related measures for figuring out how to generate rich provenance information in the Data2Semantics project. These are pretty well studied algorithms but I think we should be able to apply them differently. A good place to start is the paper:
- Sudarshan S. Chawathe, Anand Rajaraman, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Jennifer Widom. 1996. Change detection in hierarchically structured information. SIGMOD Rec. 25, 2 (June 1996), 493-504. DOI=10.1145/235968.233366 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/235968.233366
3. Also with respect to provenance, after talking with Greg Ver Steeg, I think Granger Causality and some of the other associated statistical models are worth looking at. Some pointers:
- Information Transfer and Social Media by Greg Ver Steeg, Aram Galstyan
- Granger causality and transfer entropy are equivalent for Gaussian variables by Lionel Barnett, Adam B Barrett, Anil K. Seth
4. Tran Thanh gave a nice overview of his work on Semantic Search. I liked how he combined and extended the information retrieval and database communities work using Semantic Web techniques. Keyword: Steiner Trees
5. MadSciNetwork is a site where scientists answer questions from the public. This has been around since 1995. They have collected over 40,000 answered science questions. This corpus of questions is available at MadSci Network Research. Very cool.
Finally… it’s nice to visit southern california in January when you live in cold Amsterdam 🙂
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